The conservation of biodiversity is a major environmental issue, one that promises to remain at or near the top of the environmental agenda for the foreseeable future. The loss of biodiversity affects human welfare as well as being lamentable for its own sake. Humans depend on natural systems to...

By using ad hoc value transfer protocols, this paper offers a methodological contribution and provides accurate per hectare estimates of the economic value of some selected ecosystem services for all forest biomes in the world, identified following the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment taxonomy...

Wetlands are often refereed to as the ‘kidney of the river’, but what is the value of the water filtration they provide, and what is the cost of wetland destruction? This paper determines the economic value of wetlands for water filtration. It demonstrates that wetlands are of considerable...

Edward Barbier and Geoffrey Heal explain an emerging field aimed at valuing ecosystems, whose purpose is to help policy makers decide things like how best to get New York clean water or the role that expanded wetlands might play in limiting storm damage in New Orleans.